There's a scene in the excellent movie "Fatherland", about the last days of the Reich, which kind of underscores this for me; some of the officers are talking about the possibility of surrender and one of them just starts screaming -- literally screaming -- about how he has no intention of surrendering, how he suffered through the humiliation of surrendering in the First World War and has no intention of doing so again.
Kind of striking, how much devastation and horror can be chalked down to little more than wounded pride, when all is said and done.